Smoked

CHAPTER TWO

Denny Cruz had murderer’s eyes.

That’s why the waiter never looked at him. It wasn’t the four-inch scar that came down the side of his face like a jagged stretch of highway – the scar that he left there against all the best advice of well-meaning people.

“Hey Cruz, you got the money, why don’t you get rid of that scar?” someone would say to him.

“Because I want to remember,” he would answer in a voice that rose just barely above a whisper. In Cruz’s experience, you didn’t need to talk loud to get people’s attention.

“Yeah, but one day a witness is gonna see that thing and you’re gonna go down.”

“I don’t leave witnesses.”

It wasn’t the scar. And it wasn’t his slim, razor sharp body. No. It was the eyes. Even now, after all these years, some mornings Cruz was startled to see those eyes looking back at him in the mirror. He had seen the same eyes in newspaper pictures from Rwanda. Men who had hacked thousands of innocent women and children apart with machetes, men who lived 40-deep in small, unlit cells, waiting to go on trial for genocide.

Killers.

In newspaper photographs, these men had the eyes.

Cruz sat in the open-air restaurant just off the lush courtyard and in-ground pool of the elegant Hotel St. Therese in New Orleans. He had just finished his breakfast, and his appetite had been good. He had polished off a plate of Eggs Bayou Lafourche, two golden beignets piled with snowy sugar, a glass of juice, and two cups of real New Orleans French Roast with chicory. It would be nice to light up a cigarette right about now. Of course, it was verboten to smoke indoors. Smokers like himself had been hounded and persecuted by the good clean pink-lunged people of the world for going on ten years. Soon, the smokers would probably be packed off to camps in the countryside. For their own good, you see.

No matter. Cruz felt good – well laid, well rested, well fed.

Today was the day.

He took a pleasant moment to survey his surroundings. The courtyard was green with the dense tropical plants grown there to give the place ambience. A few people sprawled about in white chaise lounges near the pool, chatting and sunning themselves. The air was heavy, the sun was bright and hot, and the sounds of conversation were muted. No children ran around, laughing and shouting. This was a place for adults. The St. Therese was a stately old place that had been a whorehouse before the turn of the century. It sat at the edge of the French Quarter, on busy North Rampart Street, across from Louis Armstrong Park, but no sound came in from the street.

It was fitting, Cruz noted, that he was sitting in an old whorehouse, and right across from him at the table, enjoying her breakfast in the splendid late morning sunshine, was a high priced whore. She was Brazilian, this sexy girl, and had deep bronze skin and blonde hair. The combination turned Cruz on to no end. That and the red mini dress she wore that barely covered her succulent ass. He was going to have to take her back up to the room again before the morning was over, that much was clear.

He liked the girl, mostly. It was her looks that did it for him. He was trying to see past the other thing.

The other thing was her brain.

He had never met such a highly-educated whore in his life. It didn’t seem to flow, this being a whore and at the same time, knowing so much.

She spoke four languages. Portuguese, Spanish, English and French. English was her weakest language, beyond doubt. As a teenager, she told him, she had gone on study exchange programs to both Paris and Caracas, Venezuela. After studying in Paris, she had taken three months and bummed around Europe, traveling as far to the east as Istanbul.

Where did the whoring come in? That’s what he was wondering. What role did that play in this whole thing? She couldn’t be very much older than 20. What did she do? Come back from Europe and decide the best thing to do was become a whore?

She had studied art and architecture. They were practically one and the same, she told him. She expounded on the architectural style of the hotel they were in, all the while scarfing down her Eggs Benedict with Canadian bacon. She told him about the paintings hanging on the walls of his suite. One was a bad knock-off of Van Gogh’s style. One was a bad knock-off of Andrew Wyeth’s style.

“You know a lot,” he said, as the waiter poured him more coffee. The waiter did not look at him or make any gesture or sign. “Such a beautiful girl, and smart too.”

She smiled at him. “How you talk.”

Her smile lit up her beauty light a thousand-watt lamp. Cruz sighed at the majesty and mystery of the world. Things were never what they seemed. He glanced at his watch again. It would be just another minute.

“Will you excuse me just one moment?” he said. “I have to take a call.”

The girl shrugged. She would. She wouldn’t. She indicated as much.

Cruz glided to the bank of old fashioned phone booths at the back of the restaurant. Real phone booths, with real doors and real privacy. He slid into the middle one, the one with the sign on it that said “Out of Order.”

He perched on the wooden seat that folded out from the wall.

The phone rang and Cruz grabbed it.

“Yeah?”

A man’s voice came on. “We checked the paper today. Still nothing.”

It was a deep, gravelly voice. The voice didn’t introduce itself, but in his mind Cruz could see the man it belonged to right away. Crag-faced, like that cartoon hero from the Fantastic Four way back when – the one made of stone. Big Vito, a man who would never say his own name.

Cruz knew what he was talking about. They were monitoring the internet version of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. They had read it the past four days, waiting for word. His employers were not patient men, and sometimes that grated on him.

“It took me a couple of days to set it up. I had to check everything out first. But I’m happy to say it’s all ready to go. It’s gonna happen tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“That’s right.”

“Good. We need you back here as soon as possible. We got a little something for you to take care of up north.”

“North?” Cruz said.

“Yeah, like New England.”

“Great. You gonna fly me straight up there?”

“No. We need you back here first.”

“All right. It’s your dime.”

“So everything will be done by tonight?”

“Tonight,” Cruz agreed.

“Good enough.” There was a pause. “Listen, how’s the girl?”

Across the restaurant, Cruz could see her, still at the table. She was examining something along the hem of her skirt. It gave him a flash of panty.

“She’s great. Very smart.”

“Smart?”

“Smart.”

“Uh, okay. How’s the suite?”

“Couldn’t be better. Richly appointed furnishings. Views of the French Quarter. 24-hour concierge.”

“All right, then. We got a new service and I just wanted to make sure everything worked out.”

“It’s great,” Cruz said.

“Then get it done, will ya? We’ll see you soon.”

Cruz returned to the table. It was shaping up to be a hot and sticky day. The girl was finishing her fruit cocktail. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember her name. Did it matter?

“What do you say?” he said. “Let’s go to the room, eh? I got a busy day today and I want to fuck you some more before I send you home.”

She slurped a cherry down, then licked the glass cup with her tongue.

“Good,” she said. “More money for me.”

They went upstairs.

“That bitch,” Darren Pelletier said.

His voice had taken on a nasal pitch because of the cotton wadding stuffed up his nose. A white plaster splint made an A-shape across its bridge. Both his eyes were black, and the whole package together made him look somewhat like a raccoon.

“You know I’m gonna make her pay, right?”

Hal Morgan didn’t say a word. He just sat in the living room of his ramshackle three-bedroom house in Auburn, Maine, thirty miles north of Portland. He let his friend ramble on. Hal’s hair hung loose and he pushed it out of his eyes. Mr. Shaggy, he often called himself when the young ladies asked. He held his first beer of the morning, a can of Budweiser. It was ice cold and felt good in his hand. He sipped it quietly while reviewing his menu of options.

They didn’t look good.

He gazed out the front picture window. He lived just down the road from the Lost Valley ski resort. In fact, he could see the small mountain – little more than a hill really – from right here on the sofa. He watched that mountain now, the bald ski runs bathed in morning sunlight, reds and oranges of fall mixed in with the evergreens along the edges of the trails.

Soon, another six weeks at most, the hill would be covered in snow. From his living room, he could watch the skiers glide down. Then, before he knew it, the scene would change yet again. The seasons passed faster and faster as he grew older. He was almost forty years old now, and it seemed like on Monday he would glance up that hill in green and sunny summertime, and on Tuesday a howling wind would blow powdery snow from the top of it.

Closer to home, his neighborhood sprawled out in what he liked to think of as the mountain’s shadow. It was a quiet neighborhood of small saltbox and ranch-style houses, not quite suburban, not quite rural. The neighborhood itself looked like it was leaning toward suburban – what with the houses just ten or twenty yards apart. But the pickup trucks with the gun racks and the sagging condition of some of the homes said the people were leaning toward rural.

He sipped his beer and watched Darren.

Darren sat sprawled in an easy chair. His shirt was off, revealing his well-muscled upper body. His sandy blonde hair was slicked back. He was drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, sulking, touching the plaster the emergency room doctor had put across his nose, cursing to himself, and looking over his various bruises all at the same time.

Mr. Blue Eyes.

The moniker fit him perfectly. Nobody had eyes that were bluer than Mr. Blue Eyes. He had eyes of pale blue – like the sky, like a Caribbean lagoon. You could fall into his eyes, they were so blue. In fact, Hal knew that Darren wore contact lenses to give his eyes that color. There was nothing wrong with his eyes that needed correction – except their color: they were actually brown.

Darren had slept in the spare bedroom because he didn’t want to go home to his wife after the beating he took. Darren often slept in the spare bedroom. Sometimes he slept in there with the girls from photo shoots they did – a lot of the girls weren’t nearly as resistant as Lola to modeling with Darren. Sometimes he slept in there alone. Beating or no, Darren rarely wanted to go home to his wife.

“Gonna eat that bitch alive next time,” he said, almost to himself. He took a deep drag from his cigarette. “Yes sir, next time I surely am gonna do it to her.”

Hal smiled. “We’ll have to put a paper bag over your head, but okay.”

Darren’s handsome face winced as he gingerly rubbed a large purplish blot on the side of his thick neck. He smiled around the cigarette. “Man, she got me good right here.” The bruise looked like an octopus imbedded in his neck, trying to push its way out through the skin. It looked like somebody had hit him there with a baseball bat.

“Oh yeah, that’s the worst of it,” Hal said. “What’d she do there?”

“Kicked me as I was falling.” Darren took a big slurp of his beer. “Or maybe it was after I was down.” The two men glanced at each other for a moment, and burst out laughing. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way. Last night had been the worst screw-up they had experienced in their new careers. A couple of girls had almost escaped, at times, and one had even pulled a gun, which they talked her into dropping. But none so far had busted out with this Bruce Lee shit. That was the one thing they hadn’t expected.

Hal took a sip of his Budweiser as the laughter subsided. “Kid, we got our asses kicked by a little girl.”

“We sure did, partner.”

They lapsed into silence, and Hal looked around the room.

He had inherited this house from his mother years before, and there was no doubt he had let the place go to hell. It was in need of a woman’s touch, maybe. The furniture was old, the window blinds were moving toward ratty, the rugs were threadbare, and bordered scuffed wooden floors that had long since needed resurfacing. The kitchen cabinets were old – they had probably been put in during the 1940’s. Ditto the stove, although it still worked well. The refrigerator was only two years old, but that was because the last one had broken. Outside, the lawn did whatever the hell if wanted. Right now, in mid-October, it was long and going toward brown, slowly dying. Bits of paper and other assorted flying garbage had embedded itself here and there on the grass. Beneath the grass, especially near the rickety front porch, were empty beer cans that Hal and Darren had chucked while sitting on the porch and bullshitting.

If the house looked bad, Hal could take comfort in the fact that it looked no worse than any of the other houses in the area. A lot of people in that neighborhood were struggling. Hal could also take some comfort in the fact that he was not struggling. In fact, with the free house and the little bit of money he had squirreled away over the years, and the new business he and Darren had been working these past eleven months, Hal felt like he was doing just fine, thank you.

Right out of high school, Hal had gone in the military. For four years, he had seen his chunk of the world. He went to Louisiana, to the Philippines, to South Korea, to Germany. On leave he checked out Southeast Asia and lots of Europe. What did he learn from all that traveling? Apart from the eye-opening food choices, he learned there are whores wherever you go. Some are a little more expensive than others, but in general, they’re all pretty cheap if you get the right ones. Sometimes it’s out of the goodness of your heart that you pay them all – he learned that one, too.

But these photo-shoot girls were the best.

Hal had a guy down in Florida who could sell anything Hal could shoot. In fact, the guy wanted more all the time. Especially these modeling agency interview shoots. People went nuts for it, and the girls lined right up to participate. Hal put up these ads, these flyers, looking for women and men. When men called, he ignored them. He didn’t want men. He wanted girls.

Saying he wanted men made the girls think he really was planning on a calendar shoot, or a catalog shoot. When they found out otherwise, they didn’t usually complain. Instead, they went limp. They obeyed. It was like, “You want me to take my clothes off? Uh, okay. You want me to put that in my mouth? Uh, okay.” Girls were passive. It was in their nature.

Hell, maybe they even liked it.

After each shoot, he’d send them out with a “We’ll call you if we need you,” or “We’ll send you a check.” He hadn’t sent anyone a check yet, and nobody had complained. What were they going to say? Some of the girls really did seem to enjoy themselves. He figured the rest of them just tried to put it out of their minds.

In case of any future trouble, Hal took precautions. He moved the office around all the time, taking short leases. He had changed the name of the business three times so far. When he transferred the video from the Mini-DV tape to the computer, he always edited his own and Darren’s faces out of the movie.

Then he would upload it to a secure web site the guy in Florida kept for submissions. Like magic, the guy would send back money. It was fun, and they were starting to make a very decent living. But this whole episode with Lola, it could jeopardize everything.

“I don’t know if you’re just talking trash or not,” Hal said. “But we do have to go back down there and talk to Ms. Lola.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“She took the digital tapes, kid. We’re on there. A brawl like that, you can hardly say she was begging for it, then changed her mind later. She decides to go to the cops, how much more evidence are they gonna need? We need to get those tapes back.”

Darren shrugged. He blew a smoke ring. “I got no problem with seeing her again. I’ll look forward to it. You know how to find her?”

“Well, she filled out that release with her address. I still have it.”

Now Darren smiled. His lumpy raccoon eyes glittered. He flexed his chest and his shoulder muscles. “Like I said, I’m gonna put a hurtin’ on that girl. I’m gonna split her wide open. And you know what? She’s gonna like it.”

They’re coming to get you.

The thought came to Smoke Dugan unbidden. It interrupted every quiet moment, ruining even the best of times. The more he tried to ignore it, the more he sent it back to where it came from, the more forcefully it resurfaced the next time. It was paranoid. It was stupid. But there it was – some part of him was convinced that they had found him.

He sat in his favorite outdoor chair, trying and failing to enjoy the early afternoon sun and the slight autumn chill in the air. The chair was a metal patio chair set before an ornate iron table in his backyard. The chair had three brothers, although rarely did anyone join him at that table.

Normally, he would have no problem enjoying the day.

The setting was perfect. It was fall and all around the neighborhood, the trees were turning. He wore a pair of baggy workpants and a bright blue Carraig Don wool sweater. He had just clipped, and now held in his gnarled hands a small Romeo y Julieta cigar. It came from the Dominican Republic, not Havana. In his present circumstances, Havana cigars were not easy to come by. That was all right. In the meantime, these Dominicans did a good job. He held the stogie to his nose and inhaled. It smelled sweet.

He had a bottle of Concha y Toro in front of him, a heart-healthy and tasty Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile. Here in Maine, the vagaries – some might call it the corruption – of the wine industry meant he couldn’t get the New York Long Island wines he had once favored. So now he experimented with the stuff from abroad, and much of it was to his liking. He had a bit of the red wine in his sparkling glass, which itself was imported Waterford crystal. Lola always cringed when she saw him using the crystal – how could he drink his everyday wine from such an expensive glass?

“Quality,” he would say, “makes it taste better.”

Nearby, Lorena Hidalgo was working in her garden. The whole backyard, except for the stone patio where Smoke now sat, the small grave plot with the tiny headstone that said, “Butch – One Smart Dog,” and the work shed in the very back, was Lorena’s garden. It was some fantastic garden. Smoke sometimes sat back there and marveled at it. It had tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, hot peppers and herbs. It had all the easy stuff. It also had carrots and cabbage and sure enough, she was growing a few pumpkins as well.

“Hey Lorena,” Smoke said. “Do me a favor and don’t go in the shed, okay? I’m working on something in there.”

Lorena looked up and made a face. “You know I never go in there. That is your place.” She went back to her gardening.

Lorena was a miracle and a menace rolled into one. She was an older lady from Guatemala. They had met a few months after Smoke had moved into the basement apartment of this house. He was sitting in the backyard at this same table, which had come with the apartment, skimming through a text on generating wind power. The backyard was a mess, and although he had toyed with the idea of clearing it, he hadn’t made any move yet. At first, he hadn’t trusted his new surroundings and was ready to leave at a moment’s notice. But after a while – for instance, after he buried that smart dog Butch – Smoke began to settle in. By the time Lorena called to him over the fence, he had decided to forget about the backyard and focus on making himself a little workshop in the old disused shed way at the back of the yard.

He closed his eyes and imagined the yard the day she had first shown up, in late March some three and a half years before. It was overgrown in places by high grasses and thick brush. In other places it was shallow mud from melting snow. Snow that hadn’t melted sat in clumps here and there. A ripped plastic bag from Shaw’s supermarket hung like a flag at the top of a bramble. Three cases of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles crouched by the door – reminders of the previous tenant. A rusty shovel and hoe leaned against the fence – the very tools Smoke had used to lay ol’ Butch to rest.

It was cool that day, but Smoke was in his shirtsleeves.

“Excuse me, mister sir!” someone called.

Smoke had a cigar that day as well, and he seemed to remember it was a dollar cigar he had bought at a highway rest stop. A man running for his life wasn’t always picky about cigars. His new name was James Dugan, and although he himself had created the name years before, he wasn’t comfortable with the first name. It seemed too bland to him. James. Everybody was named James.

He looked up from his reading and across the fence at the woman who was about to change his name for him. She was a small woman, round, impossible to tell her age, with gray and black hair and Mayan or mestizo features that seemed to have traveled time to arrive at his fence. Indeed, she wore a kerchief on her head and from the neck up could just as easily lived in 1399 as 1999. But that’s where the illusion ended. She also wore a big bubbly winter parka. It was bright red and had the words TRIPLE GOOSE DOWN stenciled in white on one of the sleeves.

“Accuse me, mister smoke,” she said, and outside of signing bank statements or paying bills, the name James went out the window.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Mister smoke?”

She smiled. She was just tall enough to clear the fence. “Mister smoke, yes. Can I help you?”

“Can you help me?”

“Yes. Of course I can.”

Talk about turning the tables. The woman’s smile was infectious. “How can you do that? Help me, I mean?”

“I can clean your house for you.”

He frowned. “Oh, that’s okay. I don’t need any house cleaning, thanks. I just moved in, and I don’t have very many things. In any case, I only have the basement.”

She went away, but the next day she was back.

“Mister smoke!”

“Yes,” Smoke Dugan said. “I am Mister Smoke.”

“I am thinking last night. It is a terrible shame about this garden. It is such a wonderful place.”

Smoke looked around at the murky jungle that surrounded him.

“I can help you with that,” the lady went on. “I propose a deal.”

“Oh, I’m not thinking about doing any gardening.”

“That is the beauty of it. You don’t do any gardening. You don’t pay me. I do the gardening. I pay you rent in the food I grow.”

“Well…” he said.

“You will eat only the freshest foods. No bad chemicals on them. I only grow them natural. Please? I have such a small garden at my home. This will be much better. It will be the wonder of the whole town.”

And so it began. Against his better judgement, Smoke had keys made for Lorena. He had to have keys made because there was no entrance to the yard. The only ways to get in were either by climbing the fence (quite out of the question for a woman “of a certain age” who just about cleared five feet tall), or by coming through the basement apartment. Lorena came there early in the mornings, tip-toeing through the efficiency apartment, past a sleeping Smoke Dugan. In the afternoon she came back, stopping for some small talk with Smoke if he sat at the back table, or leaving him alone if he was in his work shed. Smoke would sit at his table, absorbed in the problem of this or that, and gradually his awareness would begin to include sounds. The sound of clippers cutting, or the grunts of an old woman as she pulled weeds, or the squeak of the ancient wheelbarrow she had arrived with one afternoon.

And the place took shape. She cleared half the big yard that first year, the half that ran the length of the concrete wall. There was cabbage that year, tomatoes and green beans. The cucumbers were a disappointment, and the peppers were so hot that Smoke couldn’t put them on anything. But all in all, he had to agree with Lorena that the backyard was better for the garden.

Now the garden was an oasis. She had put in flagstones to mark the path to his patio, and then on to his workshop. There were giant sunflowers. There were all manner of vegetables and herbs. There were flowers. She kept the mosquitoes under control through a variety of natural means, and in any event, mosquitoes tended to stay away from Smoke’s cigars. All summer long he would get some vegetables here and there when their time came. But every year at harvest time, she presented him with a bounty of food, her part of the bargain for his allowing this garden to happen.

“Smoke,” she said now, placing three giant cucumbers and a pile of green beans in front of him, next to a paper sack filled with ripening tomatoes. “It is a beautiful, beautiful day, no?”

“It sure is,” he said.

“On a day like this, I feel like there is nothing in the whole world to worry about.”

He grunted at this, hoping his grunt sounded like agreement.

“Hmmmm?” Lorena Hidalgo said. “You say something, Smoke?”

“It’s a great day,” he said.

Open on the table was a large book of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci – anatomical studies, studies on the nature of water, drawings of the Deluge, and of various machines and other half-completed projects. Smoke loved Leo, less for his art than for his mind and for how he had pushed the envelope of human knowledge. Leo and his zany, high-speed dissections of the fresh corpses of criminals – there was no way to preserve the dead in the 1500s – had bridged the gap between the medieval understanding of the human body and the modern. Smoke could picture Leo, up to his elbows in wet gore, carefully describing and illustrating the relationships between the organs, the skeleton, the nerves and the muscle systems. But anatomy was just part of it – the sheer range of topics that came under his investigation was amazing: zoology, botany, geology, optics, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics among others. Long before these things came into being, Leo had imagined and drawn the bicycle, the automobile, the submarine, and the helicopter.

Today Smoke had hoped to study the plans for Leo’s proposed bridge across the Gulf of Istanbul, connecting the Golden Horn and the Bosporous. The bridge plan was squelched by the engineers of the time, who cringed when they found out how big it was supposed to be. Somewhere, Leo had gotten the last laugh, however, because modern engineers determined that the bridge would have been completely sound, even with the materials and methods of the 1500s.

But Smoke couldn’t focus on Leo. Instead, he kept thinking about simple booby traps. Ones you could make easily and that were practically guaranteed to seriously maim, or even kill. Wasn’t that funny? There was a long road between Smoke Dugan and Leonardo da Vinci.

The particular death trap Smoke was fixated on at this moment was a light-bulb trap. He had made one earlier in the day. So simple, a child could do it. He had taken a medical syringe and filled it with gasoline. Then he had injected the gasoline into the top of a 100-watt incandescent bulb. It had taken some doing to poke a hole through the top of the bulb, but once he had, it was nothing to inject the gasoline. In fact he injected several syringes full.

Then he had screwed the bulb into the overhead light fixture of the small corrugated shed that crouched in the back of his yard. The shed served as his workshop. Voila! The bulb hung naked, and was turned off and on by a small chain that hung down beside it. If someone were to pull that chain, the bulb would come on and the filament would ignite the gasoline. Instantly. The bulb would shatter, spraying liquid fire all over anyone standing below. Breathing the flames would roast a person’s cilia, the tiny hairs in the esophagus that protect lungs from harmful pollutants. Should be enough to kill anybody.

Maybe the person would even catch fire.

Now that would be something.

Smoke didn’t like heights.

That’s how he thought of it: he didn’t like heights. He didn’t consider that he was afraid of heights. He rarely talked about it, and when he did, he didn’t describe the breathlessness, the shaking, the heart palpitations and the fear – nay, terror – of dying that seemed to come over him when confronted with a high place. Even in the reaches of his own mind, he seldom admitted the sense of things spinning out of control that heights brought on, or the waves of unreality that seemed to wash over him.

He didn’t like heights, that was all. He didn’t like them a lot.

On the drive over to Lola’s apartment, Smoke got caught on the Casco Bay Bridge. He watched with dismay as the red lights began to flash, the safety arms – so like the safety arms at railroad crossings – came down, and the traffic ahead of his little Toyota Tercel slowed to a stop. The span that crossed the high end of Portland harbor, where it met the Fore River, was a drawbridge. He put the car in park and sullenly stared ahead as the giant steel grates of the bridge began to inch toward the sky.

He was ten cars back from the front of the line. He was way up there, six and a half stories above the high water mark. And it seemed like more than that.

Smoke knew how high he was because he had studied the schematics in the public library. He crossed the bridge damn near every day – he figured he ought to know something about it. It was a new bridge, opened only in late 1997, and had won awards for design and for aesthetics. It had replaced the old, deteriorating and outmoded Million Dollar Bridge that had stood there before it. It was a vast improvement over the old bridge, which had cleared the water line by a scant two and a half stories.

Portland was a busy oil port, one of the busiest on the East Coast. It was also low to the water. To make any bridge tall enough for the tankers would have meant an impossible angle shooting straight up in the air and straight back down again. So they made these goddamn drawbridges instead.

Which was fine with Smoke except when he got stuck with the bridge up. Driving across the bridge itself, he was okay with that. Although it was nearly a mile long, all that meant was about a minute, maybe two minutes on the span. And most of the bridge wasn’t all that high. There were maybe two hundred yards at the very top of the bridge that were a good six or seven stories above the harbor. Even this section was okay if Smoke kept his eyes on the road or on the car in front of him, and thought of other things, and drove smoothly along until he reached the stoplight at the far end of the span. He made it across the bridge many times in just this manner.

But today he got caught at the draw, and to make matters worse, he got caught at the very top. As he sat behind the wheel he felt beads of sweat breaking out on his back. Then they broke out on his brow, and his hands began to tremble oh so slightly.

Look at you, you’re ridiculous, he thought, a grown man acting like this. And not just any grown man, he realized. A criminal. A bank robber.

A murderer.

He was a man who had sunk his own boat – his Boston Whaler – in a terrible storm off the eastern end of Long Island, and lived, not to tell about it, but lived nonetheless. He had been through real dangers and had escaped death. Yet this simple act of sitting on a bridge put him in his place. Just ahead, the steel cage towered high above him, still rising. It filled his windshield.

So don’t look out at the water, he told himself. Which was silly, of course. It was like telling somebody not to think of the color red. Then of course all they can think about is the color red. Red barns and red apples and red fire trucks and red stop signs and bright red cherries. Don’t look out at that view – the one some people raved about, how it took in the vast blue sky, and the sweep of the city’s skyline along the harbor, green islands and white sailboats in the distance.

Smoke looked.

He was high above the water. Way down below, he saw the tanker pulling through the bridge and into port. The deck of the tanker was about to pass through the opening. If Smoke were to somehow fall from that height, he imagined, he would smash like a tomato against the solid decking of that tanker. It would be a sickening five second fall, followed by a wet thud as the liquid insides of his body splashed in different directions much to the chagrin of a few startled Chinese sailors.

They’d probably laugh about it later.

Remember the suicide, he thought. Remember the suicide. Three years before, just after Smoke had settled here, a distraught mother of five had walked out onto the bridge. She had been put off welfare some time before, and had ground out a slow struggle on a work program. But she hadn’t cut the mustard. Work just wasn’t for her, not at the age of thirty, not after twelve years, her entire adult life, on the dole. Her electricity had been cut off, so she and her children were now sitting in the dark with no money, no prospects and most of all, no lights.

She walked out on that bridge, and without so much as a scream or a speech or a final telephone call, she climbed the very low fence at the top. It was little more than waist high. Smoke had noticed it several times. To his mind, it was so low a person could practically fall over it, never mind climb over.

As traffic screeched to a halt all around her and people came running to stop her, she leapt to what she thought was a certain death. A crowd of people gasped as she fell away and seconds later, hit the water far below.

And lived.

Without so much as a broken bone, or even a sprained ankle.

In fact, a young carpenter on his way to work acted without thinking, and jumped off the bridge in a desperate bid to save her life. And lived. Without a scratch. When the Coast Guard fished the two of them out of the water, the young man told the waiting reporters that the jump was the most fun he had ever had.

None of which made sitting there any easier on Smoke. He knew it intellectually. A person could live after falling from that bridge. But his body knew different. A fall from that bridge and he would be fish bait. And curiously, he felt drawn, compelled even, to the edge of it. The worst of his dislike of heights was the madness that gripped him – it made him want to jump.

Smoke’s grip had tightened around the wheel and he heard his breath coming in shallow gasps. He was mouth-breathing, never a good sign. He tried to loosen up and relax, but gripped the wheel harder than ever. A bead of sweat rolled down to the end of his nose. It wasn’t even hot out. His heart skipped a beat. His stomach lurched and did a lazy barrel roll.

He saw himself hit the deck of that tanker again.

“Shit,” he said through clenched teeth. “Shit on this.”

It had happened more than forty years earlier, back in Hell’s Kitchen.

He could see those days like they were yesterday. The five-story walk-ups they all lived in – tenements, the newspapers used to call them. All along Ninth Avenue, clothes were hung out to dry on the fire escapes. There was a constant buzz of sound, day or night, punctuated by the odd shouts or screams. The Irish, the Italians, all poor, all cramped together, and now the Puerto Ricans coming in. Smoke couldn’t remember a time when there weren’t Puerto Ricans, but his mother – all the grown-ups – talked like the spicks had never existed just a few years before.

Smoke was still Wally O’Malley then, and he was already running with the wrong crowd. In Hell’s Kitchen there was no other crowd.

Born with a bum leg, there was a lot little O’Malley couldn’t do. He couldn’t play stickball. He couldn’t fight – in a fist fight, his leg would give out from under him.

But there was one thing he could do…

It was a hot spring day. The boys stood out on the corner of 53^rd and Ninth, laughing and joking. O’Malley was with them. They leaned against the lamppost or the wall, cigarettes hanging from twelve year-old mouths, wearing stove pipe jeans, sports shirts with collars turned up. The teacher would wring your neck for a turned up collar in school, but there were no teachers on the street. They patted down their slicked back hair, every strand in place. Very carefully, very precisely cool. Squinting and watching the cars cruise the Avenue. Talking, talking, talking that good bullshit.

“You seen the tits on Maggie Lefferts?”

“Maggie Lefferts? Shit.”

“You seen the ass on that spick girl in class? Jesus. Now that’s a nice ass. What’s her name?”

“Yeah, but whaddya gonna do? Fuck a spick girl? You know what I’m saying? Who gives a shit what it looks like if you can’t get at it?”

Artie Mulligan came walking up the block. O’Malley could see from half a block away that something was wrong. He was walking…wrong. Then he saw the blood streaming down Artie’s face. Artie Mulligan – twelve years old and already tougher than leather, a born leader of men, shot dead in a tangle with FBI agents eleven years later – Artie had gotten a beat down.

He stood among them now, his eyes on fire.

“Motherfuckers.”

He leaned on a car and lit a smoke. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking. O’Malley noticed, not for the first time, how skinny Artie was, how small. Size didn’t mean shit.

“Who did it, Artie?”

“Ace McCoy, Phil Evans, some of those.”

The boys looked at him and nobody said a thing. Ace McCoy was 16 years old. His whole crew were fifteen, sixteen, just about to cross the threshold into manhood. In a year or two they would go to work on the docks, or join the Army, or get on board as street muscle in man-sized rackets – in a few years they’d be doing man-sized prison terms. If they weren’t men yet, they were about to be.

Artie stared right at O’Malley. Wally O’Malley was high up in Artie’s brain trust. More than that – O’Malley was Artie’s brain trust.

“What can we do?”

O’Malley shrugged. Then he smiled. “I have an idea.”

The older boys had a clubhouse they kept in a vacant lot between two buildings. The clubhouse was made of wooden pallets stolen from the docks on the river. The pallets were tied together with rope. The roof was a slab of sheet metal placed on top of the pallets, and the furniture was discarded rubber tires. The clubhouse slumped in the back of that vacant lot, hidden by the weeds, but all the neighborhood kids knew it was there. They also knew not to mess with it, or go there at all.

“I need gasoline,” O’Malley said. “And motor oil.”

A pint of gas, a pint of motor oil, that was all. The boys could siphon. The boys could steal. They had it in an hour. Then they gathered some rags together and two empty Coke bottles. O’Malley showed them how to make firebombs, two to be exact, with the gas and oil mixed together, the gas-soaked rags stuffed into the bottles, a long piece of rag blocking the neck and poking out as the wick for each bomb.

“Why the oil?” Artie said.

O’Malley smiled. “It makes the gas sticky.”

He wasn’t there when they bombed the clubhouse. He couldn’t run away if it came to that, so he waited at home for the news. He sat on the Murphy bed in the tiny railroad apartment, watching a cockroach move along the wall. From where he sat the pungent odor of burning tires came through the open window and reached his nose.

“Yeah,” he said. “We showed ‘em.”

Artie Mulligan would be pleased.

A few days later, O’Malley was on the roof of the building. Up here, there was light and space. Up here, he could escape from the dark and cramped apartment, from the narrow hallways and stairs, from the crush of people on the street. The roof was his sanctuary. He moved across the gravel and gazed out at the endless vista of clotheslines and TV antennas. Three buildings away, a one minute walk stepping over air shafts, old Mr. Principato stood waving a white flag on a long pole, putting a flock of pigeons through their paces.

O’Malley sat along the low wall and gazed down at 49^th Street, five stories below. The street was a hive of activity, the people moving to and fro, and he watched it all as if he were stationed on some far away planet.

A shadow moved behind him.

He turned and four teenaged boys stood there. They were slim and tall and well-muscled in their tight white T-shirts. True to form, one of the boys had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve, showing off one bulging and tattooed bicep. Greaseballs. They loomed over him like dinosaurs above a scrap of hamburger. He became aware of how small he was – and not small like Artie. Small small. Small in his mind. Small in his presence. Small in his very being somehow. He became conscious most of all of his right leg and of how useless it was.

He knew a few of their names. Ace McCoy was right out in front with the cigarettes and the tattoo. O’Malley had seen Ace and his crew around, and what was bad about the situation was they had evidently seen him as well.

“Hey there, Gimp,” Ace said.

“Hi,” O’Malley said.

“Hi, that’s rich,” Ace said. He put a big fake smile on and waved like an idiot. “Hi!”

The other three laughed – a merciless sort of laugh. A tall blonde one said, “You know why we’re here, right?”

O’Malley tried to give them nothing, but already he could feel his body shaking. Already he could feel his heart pumping in his chest. “N-no.”

“Nuh-nuh-no. I knew you were a gimp. I didn’t know you were also a stutter.”

“I’m n-n-not.”

All of them laughed now.

Ace squatted down to Smoke’s level where he sat on the wall. “Our clubhouse got burned up the other day, Mr. Gimp. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? You wouldn’t know any smart guys who like to make firebombs, right?”

Smoke shook his head, moved to say something, if only he could get his lips unstuck one from the other.

“Now wait a minute, before you say anything you need to know something about us. What you need to know is we like stand-up guys who tell the truth. Guys who lie, we don’t like them. Bad things happen to guys who lie.”

O’Malley found his voice. “I don’t know anything about it.” Once it was out there, he found he had surprised himself with the statement. It came out strong and firm, like he meant it. “The bombs, I mean. I don’t know anything about that at all.”

“You don’t, huh?”

“Nope.”

“Then how did you know there was more than one bomb?”

“You just said it yourself. You said it was bombs.”

“Did I say that boys?”

“I didn’t hear you say bombs, Ace. I heard you say bomb.”

“No, you didn’t,” O’Malley said. “You said bombs.”

Ace stood up. “Okay, if that’s what you say, I guess we gotta deal with that. You say I said bombs. You say you don’t know about it.”

“That’s exactly right.”

Ace took a long drag on his cigarette, regarded the short butt remaining, then flicked it into O’Malley’s face.

“Fuckin’ liar.”

Three of them grabbed him. He tried to kick and punch them, but they were too strong. Within a couple of seconds, they had him under control.

Ace gestured at the open air on the other side of the wall, the five-story drop to the pavement below.

“Liars take the dive. Okay boys, let’s see what he says to that.”

O’Malley fought them, but it did no good. They lifted him into the air and turned him upside down. Then they held him out over the edge by the legs. O’Malley’s arms dangled down helplessly. His hair dangled down. His shirt came un-tucked and fell down almost to his nipples. He felt the pressure of the blood rushing to his head. He saw the activity down below, all of it oblivious to his plight up here.

It went on for a long time. They were saying things to him now, and he could hear their voices, but the sounds had melted together into a slow-motion, unintelligible mush. All there was out there was that upside-down view of the street, so far away. He felt their hands slipping on his legs. They grabbed him harder and higher, the split second as they abandoned their old grip for a new one stretching out sickeningly. They laughed because they had almost dropped him. The world spun.

He felt his bladder go.

The piss went with gravity as all things will do. Instead of running down his legs, it soaked through the fabric of his pants, it cascaded between his belt and his waist, and streamed down his torso and chest. Droplets made the journey past his shirt and rolled down his neck to his chin. His tasted urine on his lips. And still more came. He had never pissed so much in his life.

“Look! He’s pissing on his own face!”

He heard that much clearly.

He didn’t care that he was pissing on his own face. He didn’t care if he ended up shitting on his own face, if that was even possible. What he cared about was these kids were going to drop him, either because they would lose their grip on him, or because they were sadistic bastards and they didn’t care if they killed him. They were going to drop him and he was going to take an incredible dive to the pavement, one that would seem long but would be too short. One that would end with him splattered on concrete like an overripe gourd.

“I didn’t do it!” he screamed. “I didn’t do it!”

The car behind him honked its horn, really leaning on it. Smoke looked up and noticed for the first time that the drawbridge was down and he was free to go. He’d been free to go for a while, by the looks of things. Traffic was streaming by him on the left. To the right, that drop to the water still beckoned. The driver behind him honked again.

Glad as ever to be getting down from there, Smoke put the car in gear and cruised toward the end of the bridge.

“Are you going to tell him?” said Pamela Gray.

Pamela was Lola’s roommate of two years – and in many ways Lola’s opposite. She was pretty in an understated way, and dressed conservatively compared to Lola’s sometimes sexy, sometimes outrageous sense of style. She had grown up in a quiet New Hampshire suburb with a typical nuclear family. She was bookish – she devoured romance novels, for instance. At the same time, she had an edgy side to her – Lola had picked up one or two of Pamela’s romance novels. The books she read were the steamy kind – adventure tales of pirates on the high seas, of wild untamed women and dark men with powerful thighs and raging, uncircumsized members. Bodice rippers, she sometimes called them, historical rape novels.

Pamela was shy about men, okay, but there was more to her than met the eye. When you got her going, she had a tongue that was plenty sharp. And she was not afraid to speak her mind.

“Am I going to tell what to whom?” Lola said.

Lola and Pamela were cooking dinner. As they talked, they bustled about the kitchen. Tonight was smoked salmon with cream cheese, lightly sauteed Digby scallops and shrimps, and garden salad made from Lorena’s bounty. Pamela had made a chocolate mousse for dessert. They had already opened up the first bottle of wine. Smoke was coming, and the two women sometimes cooked together for him as though he belonged to both of them. They would share him, his conversation, his sense of humor, the warm smell of his cigar, right up until the time came for Smoke and Lola to go to bed.

“Are you going to tell Smoke about what happened?”

“Why? So I can upset him? So he can decide to be chivalrous and go off looking for them and maybe get himself killed? There’s nothing anybody can do, and besides, no harm done. I fought them off. I won.”

Pamela didn’t smile. “But what about the next one? Will she win? What if it was me? Would I have won?”

Lola was silent.

“I’ll have to think about it.”

“I think you should tell Smoke and then you should go to the police.”

Lola began to think she should have gone to Smoke’s for dinner. If Pamela was going to be so adamant about this, what slip of her tongue might be loosed during conversation after a few glasses of wine?

But then, going to Smoke’s would be too strange. Lola rarely went to Smoke’s apartment at all, and never went there to stay the night. She liked many things about Smoke. She liked that he worked with his hands, and that his hands were the thick, rough and strong hands of a working man. She liked the smell of his evening cigar, especially when they were on the deck together, looking out over the water and the sweet smoke would pass for a second before the breeze lifted it and took it away on the air. She liked his smile, and the fact that he chose to do his work for children. She liked that he was so smart. It seemed he could make anything.

But she didn’t like his apartment. He lived in a dingy basement efficiency with bad light. He kept books and papers piled up on the kitchen table at all times. He kept six cats which had the run of the place, with all the unpleasantness that suggested. Their litter boxes were in the bathroom, and Smoke wasn’t the most fastidious man on earth about cleaning the boxes. Smoke often brought greasy and dirty pieces of machinery into the apartment from his shed out in the garden, and left these either on the kitchen table or on the floor. Finally, the place smelled like smoke. It wasn’t the wisp of cigar smoke blowing on the wind, but the built-up smell of dozens of cigars trapped in the apartment during the three-year period he had lived there.

No sir. Lola did not want to spend the night in such a place. She had done it a few times, waking up each time with a cat nestled on her head and the smell of cigars in her clothes. They had come to an agreement. If Smoke wanted to spend the night with her, then he had to spend it at her place.

They lived on the top floor of a three story brick building at the top of Munjoy Hill. It was a large two-bedroom apartment. The back deck gave out on a view across the back yard to the Eastern Promenade, and a splendid view of the harbor and sailboats out there.

The apartment below them was empty. When the previous tenants had moved out, the landlord had decided to renovate, and so workmen were there during the day on weekdays, and in the evenings no one was down there. On the very bottom was an old man who had come to Portland to play with the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Pamela had a crush on him.

Which brought Lola to the crux of the Pamela conundrum – she was attractive, smart, and well-read. She kept herself fit by jogging and working out with weights, and made good money as a librarian at the Portland Public Library. Yet in two years together, Lola hadn’t seen Pamela go out on a single date with a man.

Oh Pamela.

“I just think,” she would say, “you know, you’ve got an old man and it seems to be working out, so maybe I should go for one myself.”

“Pamela,” Lola said, “Smoke is almost 60. Okay, he’s a lot older than I am. But Mr. Scheiskopf must be 75 at least. That’s old. I mean, who can say if he even gets it up anymore, or even wants to?”

“Is that all that matters?”

Lola shook her head. “Obviously, that’s not all that matters. But it’s one of the things that matters, at least to me. Men are good for some things. Other things, they’re not so good for. That happens to be one of the things they are good for.”

Pamela smiled. “Oh, I bet he does get it up. He’s fit for his age. He’s a musician. He’s vital and creative. I bet he does everything, wants everything. He wants to experience everything right up to that last moment. He wants to be fully alive.”

Lola held her tongue. She wasn’t sure, but she guessed the library might not be the greatest place to meet men.

Not that it mattered. Lola thought a woman could go about her business and have a full life without a man in it. She had spent plenty of time without a man in her own life. But for Pamela, men seemed an obsession. She wanted to be with a man, but then seemed to repel them as though they were invaders. If any young attractive man approached her, she went stone cold. Then she developed elaborate fantasies about people like Mr. Scheiskopf, a man she had hardly ever spoken to. She didn’t know anything about him except he was a musician and played for the Symphony. Sometimes the two of them heard the strains coming from his violin as they entered the building. Scheiskopf was practically a hermit, yet Pamela had given him this rich life as a vital genius musician. Who really knew what he was doing in there?

Lola, on the other hand, had never suffered a lack of male attention. In fact, she had always received too much of it. She knew she was sexually attractive from the time she was twelve. She was long and leggy. She had wild curly hair and deep brown eyes. She was high-yellow black, with a taste of American Indian blood in her that gave her an exotic look. The family legend had it that her great-great-grandfather was a Sioux who had fought at Little Big Horn alongside Crazy Horse. Lola often felt she had the blood of that long-lost Indian brave singing in her soul. It was like she could feel him there, approving when she took the bold and courageous road in life, quietly disapproving when she was not brave.

What would be the brave thing to do here? To go to the police? To tell Smoke?

She thought warmly of Smoke – her old man. He had a way about him, a quiet confidence, that made her want to be with him. He was handsome, for sure, and the best lover she had ever had. She remembered the first day she had seen him at the school where she had started working as a teacher’s assistant. All the women there were enthralled with him. He came to the school because he made toys for the special children, especially the ones who came from poor families. They were wonderful toys with lights and sounds and big colorful buttons. The children would laugh and laugh, delighted each time they pressed a button. And Smoke made the toys for free – the story went that he was a retired engineer and inventor who had made a lot of money and who was now giving of himself. His eyes had a glint to them as he played with the children, a sparkle that made her think of a slim and wiry Santa Claus. When her eyes met his, it was there between them the very first time.

“Young lady,” he said. “If we’ve met before, and I don’t recall the exact day and time, then I must be growing old indeed.”

But he was no fighter. He had a bum leg that he had broken as a child and that had never healed properly. He could barely walk without his cane. And there was nothing in his personality that was violent or even aggressive. In fact, despite his strong hands, and the forearms of a sailor, Smoke was about the gentlest man she had ever met.

No, she wouldn’t tell Smoke about what had happened. She didn’t want to drag him into some kind of showdown he wasn’t built for. If there was any more to what had happened, she could and would handle it herself.

They were just about done putting the dinner together. Pamela poured a little more wine in both their glasses.

“So what are you going to do?” she said.

“I’m going to wait and see,” Lola said. “Okay?”

Lola stared at Pamela, waiting for an answer. At last, Pamela raised her hands as if she were under arrest. “Okay. I’m not going to say anything.”

Just then, a key turned in the lock, the door to the apartment opened, and the object of their attention walked in. Smoke Dugan appeared in the flesh, a dapper grin on his face, his cane in one hand, a paper bag with a loaf of long French bread cradled in the other.

Again Lola realized how happy she was to have him. Some would say that Lola could have any man she wanted – and that was probably true, as far as it went. She could have any man for a night or two, any muscle bound young man who wanted her for only one thing. Smoke wanted that thing, too. And that was great. But he wanted more, and he wanted to give more. The past year, she reflected, had been the fullest, and the happiest year of her life.

“Ladies,” he said. “Fantasize no more. The man of your dreams has arrived.”

Night in the French Quarter.

The crowds swirled down the narrow streets. Above them, the lacy ironwork of the Spanish-style balconies were like tropical gardens teeming with ivy, begonias, ferns and young women flashing their breasts to passers-by. Shouts and laughter, and strings of Mardi Gras beads came from the streets below. Camera flashbulbs popped.

Disneyland for drunks, Cruz had heard it called.

He leaned against an ornate light post on Decatur Street, watching the people move along. He wore khaki pants and a large colorful Hawaiian shirt that hung down below his waistband. He slowly sipped from a plastic bottle of lime seltzer.

A young guy in gym shorts and a t-shirt peeled off from a group of college kids, boys and girls, all-Americans. The guy wore a baseball cap backwards. His shirt – pulled tight to a chest inflated by many hours in the gym – said DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. He had a big plastic tumbler of a fruity drink. He came toward Cruz, stumbling just a bit and grinning. He was four or five inches taller than Cruz, and probably outweighed him by seventy pounds. It looked like a lifetime of mild success at sports had convinced the kid he was immortal. He reminded Cruz of one of those kids he had seen on TV, the ones that threw the cheerleaders in the air at college basketball games.

“Hey Scarface,” the kid said. “How ya doing?”

He stuck his hand out. Cruz ignored it.

“The girls over there? They think you’re cute. They want you to come out with us.”

Cruz glanced over at the gaggle of college kids across the street. The group looked over at him. A couple of the girls laughed. He turned back to the kid.

“I’m busy.”

The kid poked Cruz’s shoulder.

“Didn’t you hear me? They think you’re cute. The way you got your hair all greased up. It’s cute.” He poked Cruz again. It was more of a push the second time.

“I want you to do something,” Cruz said. He hadn’t moved from the post.

“Yeah? What’s that?” The kid smirked.

“I want you to look right here, into my eyes, and listen to what I tell you. Okay? Look right here.”

The kid did so, and already the wild light was dying from his own eyes. In an instant, he saw something there, something Cruz well knew. It was the reason Cruz rarely looked directly into the eyes of the straight world. It did him no good to go around scaring grocery cashiers and rent-a-car clerks.

“You’re a good kid, right? Grew up in a nice house? Gonna have a nice life, sell stocks or some shit. Right?”

The kid nodded. He looked down at his sneakers.

“No, don’t look away. I want you to look right here.”

With some effort, the kid lifted his gaze again. Cruz spoke quietly, his voice raising just above a whisper – but loud enough for the kid to hear.

“Good. That’s good. Now I’m only gonna tell you this once, but I think once will be enough. I said I was busy, and I meant it. You stay here any longer and I’m gonna cut you up and feed you to my dogs. You understand, right?”

The kid looked down again, nodded.

“Okay. Now get lost.”

An hour passed.

It was after midnight. The streets were still jammed. Cruz had hardly moved since the kid had left. No one had spoken to him since then. He watched the door of the hotel across the street, trying not to grow annoyed.

He had called upstairs a few minutes ago. Carmine was still up there in his room. When Carmine had answered, Cruz had affected an accent, looking for Pablo, and Carmine told him to go fuck himself, he had the wrong number. Rather, he had slurred it. Carmine was drunk again.

Carmine Giobbi. Carmine the Nose.

Carmine had money problems. He had borrowed so much that he had no way to pay it back. It was okay when he owed it somewhere else. But once you started burning your own people for money, the game was over. Carmine couldn’t even pay the juice anymore. Half a mil, the dossier said he owed.

Half a mil? Cruz suspected it was more than that.

Carmine had already been gone a month with no contact. That was way too long.

Now it looked like he had no plans of coming back. It looked like he was going to stay down here and drink. Cruz had watched him two full nights so far, and by the end of them, Carmine had been so drunk the whores he picked up could hardly keep him standing. Carmine was a big heavy man. He had a goddamn big nose, too.

They couldn’t have Carmine down here, drinking every night with strangers. The time had come to send him home.

Here came the big lug now. He stepped out onto the street from the hotel and started down the block. No surprise, he looked just like an enforcer on vacation. White silk shirt, top three buttons open, showing his hairy chest and his gold crucifix, hanging loose at the bottom as if to cover a piece in his waistband. There was no piece, at least, not the night before.. Cruz had crept close enough to Carmine the night before to thoroughly examine the area at the bottom of his shirt. Carmine might be loaded with weapons in his hotel room, but he went out at night unarmed. Khaki pants and alligator shoes rounded out Carmine’s clothing ensemble.

His gold watch sparkled. Of course it was a Rolex. Cruz had gotten an up close look at it in a bar the night before. It was a wonder nobody had rolled Carmine for it yet, for the watch and that fat billfold he kept whipping out.

What was wrong with this guy?

He was drunk already. Sure. He had probably been knocking them back in his room since whatever time he woke up. Sitting on the balcony, drinking, watching the day pass into evening, watching the evening pass into night, the crowds gathering, the streets glowing with excitement.

Cruz pushed himself away from the light post and started walking.

Up ahead, Carmine weaved through the crowded streets. His big shoulders bumped a couple of people out of his way. Carmine was a handful, all right.

Cruz kept a safe distance. He watched as the Nose entered an open air bar, grabbed a woman’s ass, then got in a shoving match with the woman’s boyfriend. He nearly shoved the guy through the wall. The bouncers, three of them, walked him out of there, consoling him with pats on the back. Big guys were all the same, and they liked to see those pushy, big guy traits in each other. A guy Cruz’s size pulled that kind of shit in that bar? Those bouncers would take him outside and tap dance on his skull.

Carmine stumbled on. He went into another bar and grabbed another woman’s ass. This ass grabbing, this was something new.

After an hour, Cruz had had enough.

The streets were still crowded, but the tone had changed. People were very drunk now. Women screamed for no reason at all. A man leaned over and puked into the gutter. A small crowd gathered around a young man who had fallen down and lay sprawled on the concrete, unable to stand. Carmine staggered along through it all like the monster from Frankenstein. Then he stopped, looked around and turned down an alley.

Shrewd Carmine, making sure the coast was clear.

Cruz surveyed the scene from across the street. No cops anywhere. Lots of people milling about, going this way and that. A darkened alley between buildings. And Carmine down there, probably taking a piss.

Cruz crossed the street and walked toward the mouth of the alley. As he did so, he took two thin leather gloves out, one from each of his front pockets, and slid them onto his hands, like a doctor preparing for surgery.

Down the alley, just twenty yards down, big Carmine leaned up against the wall, bracing himself with a hairy arm. The other hand had worked his whanger out of his pants. A steady stream emanated from it, soaking the wall and splashing back on Carmine’s pants and shoes.

Jesus, the guy was a mess.

“Carmine.”

“Yeah, just a minute here. Gotta water the flowers.” Carmine’s lower lip hung down.

Cruz worked the stunted black Glock pocket pistol – the. 40 caliber M-27 – from the back of his pants. Cruz always demanded the M-27. It was smaller than the standard Glock, it was light, it was concealable even with a longer, threaded barrel attached so it could take a silencer. Nine rounds was more than enough for Cruz,. 40 cal was excellent stopping power, and the gun itself always worked – rain, heat, cold, snow, it didn’t matter. The Glock worked.

He quickly attached the silencer, a Gemtech SOS-40, a nice one. They always gave him nice toys on these jobs, anything he wanted. And he was a creature of habit – what had worked in the past would work in the future. He held the gun so his back was blocking it from the sight of any pedestrians on the street. He glanced out there. Nobody was looking. He stepped closer to his quarry.

“You know me, Carmine?”

Carmine looked up, his eyes half-closed and bloodshot. He squinted at Cruz.

“No.”

Cruz approached and put an arm around Carmine’s massive shoulders. Cruz felt nothing out of the ordinary. His heart wasn’t beating hard. He wasn’t sweating more than the humid southern night warranted. If anything, he felt a pang of mild embarrassment, what with Carmine’s Italian sausage hanging there.

“No, you’re right. You don’t know me. We’ve never met before. But I know you.”

Carmine peered down at his fancy alligator shoes, wet now with urine.

“I think I’m gonna puke.”

“Carmine. I know you, you understand? It’s important you understand this.”

Carmine looked at Cruz again. Something like a dull light ignited behind his eyes. “They sent you? From New York?”

“That’s right.”

The big man nodded. “Okay.”

“You get it?” Cruz said.

“Yeah. I get it.”

Cruz clapped him on the back. “Good man. You got anything you wanna say?”

“Yeah. Tell ‘em to go fuck themself.”

Cruz brought the Glock around with his left hand and placed the silenced muzzle against Carmine’s meaty chest. Carmine looked down at the gun. Cruz looked at it. All it took was a few ounces of pressure and he would send Carmine off to the next world.

The seconds passed.

And for some reason, the finger didn’t pull the trigger.

Shit, it was happening again.

Then the gravity of the situation penetrated Carmine’s pickled brain. His eyes opened wide and he came awake. “Hey, get that fucking thing away from me.”

His reflexes, now activated, were fast. He grabbed the gun with both hands. He forced Cruz to point it heavenward, pushed Cruz back against the brickwork, then came up with a savage knee to Cruz’s gut.

Cruz felt his wind go out of him in a long hiss. He felt the gun yanked out of his hand. He sank, knees to the hard pavement, trying to catch his breath. He ripped the buttons of his shirt away and reached inside.

Carmine tottered over him, huge, towering. Gun in one giant hand.

He brought it down to point at Cruz. Cruz stared down the black maw, death just seconds away. He felt nothing, thought nothing.

“Hey dickhead,” the Nose said.

Cruz pulled the surgical tape away from his chest. He grabbed the four inch Buck Woodsman knife he kept strapped there.

“Tell ‘em I ain’t that easy, see?”

Cruz lunged, just as Carmine fired. He stabbed, fast and crazy, in and out, four times, five times.

The gun made a near silent, “phut, phut, phut.”

A breeze went past Cruz’s head. Bullets whined off the brick wall and ricocheted down the alley.

Cruz looked up at Carmine, who stared down with something like surprise. Cruz had plunged the knife up to its handle. It was buried in Carmine’s lower abdomen. Cruz renewed his grip. Then he ripped upward, all the way to Carmine’s rib cage. Carmine’s face went slack again. Blood flowed from his mouth.

Gently, Cruz took the gun from Carmine’s hand.

He stood and put the gun to the big man’s heart. Again. Again he hesitated. Carmine was weaving. His eyes had gone blank. Blood flowed from him. Either it was the booze or his own brute strength and stupidity that kept him standing.

Well, he was going to die anyway.

Cruz pulled the trigger. He fired three times into Carmine’s heart, then lowered him to the ground.

Back out on the street, gloves off. The crowds were still there. People staggered to and fro. A woman with a big floppy sun hat fell down, laughing. Cruz began to stagger just a little, as if he himself were drunk. His flowery shirt was splashed with some of Carmine’s blood. Worse, Carmine’s smell was on him. The sharp scent of booze mingled with the coppery stench of blood.

It made him sick. It made him shake.

Cruz walked around the block. Knots of people laughed, stumbled, screamed. More beads flew through the air. Cruz turned a street corner, quickly wiped the knife handle for any possible prints and dropped the knife down a sewer hole. He would break down the gun and get rid of it later – a piece here, a piece there, the farther apart the better.

He came past the alley again. From the street, there seemed to be nothing down there. Just a big drunk sleeping off a bender.

A beam of cold moonlight stabbed into the room.

Smoke sat up in bed, sipping his last glass of wine. It had been a lovely evening, sitting on the deck with two lovely ladies, eating a fine meal, watching the ships pass as the sun set behind the building. They had chatted and laughed with Pamela until it was full dark and too cold to sit outside anymore. Then they had made an assembly line and washed all the dishes.

Some coffee, a little more wine and laughter in the living room, then Lola and he had come in here for a long, slow bout of lovemaking. They began, but the spark wasn’t there. His hands had felt like lead.

It started, it stopped. It fizzled out.

“You seem distant,” he said after they gave it up for good.

“Not distant,” she said. “Just thoughtful.”

“Okay. Thoughtful.”

Now, Lola’s warm and sleeping form pushed up against his. Her arm was around his waist. Across the room, the digital clock read 2:35. There was no sound anywhere. That was the thing about this city – when night came, the sidewalks rolled up and it was almost as if no one lived there.

Her voice came, quiet and thick with sleep. “Smoke?”

“Yeah, babe.”

“Do you love me?”

“You know I do.”

“That’s good, Smoke. Real good.”

A few moments passed, and her breathing deepened and became rhythmic. She was gone again and he was here, awake and on the case. Her protector.

He was going to have to tell her something soon. He just didn’t know what that something would be.